With the advent of spelling checker functions on typewriters, starting in 1984, the typewriter had a dictionary of words of a finite size built into the electronic controls. The presence of this dictionary allowed the typewriter to provide the operator with spelling verification. When a word was misspelled as determined by the spelling checker function, the operator could correct it based upon personal knowledge, by the correct spelling of the word being keyed to replace the incorrectly spelled word. This approach is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,136,395 to Kolpek et al.
With the candidate words being contained in the dictionary, an algorithm was developed to select the most likely candidates, based upon such parameters as beginning letter, word length and others. With the candidate words selected and displayed to the operator, it only remained for the operator to select the desired one of the candidate words for substitution for the incorrectly spelled word.
When the correctly spelled word is provided to the processor, the processor automatically controls the printing mechanism of the typewriter to cause the erasure of the incorrectly spelled word and the printing of the correctly spelled replacement word. This results in the unnecessary removal and retyping of letters that are correct in the word and in the proper position. The resulting sequence of operations involve a waste of time, printing ribbon and correction ribbon, all resulting in the waste of money and inefficiencies.
A significant reason for the inclusion of the spelling assistance feature on a typewriter is to increase the quality of work, efficiency and productivity of the typist. Once the spelling assistance capability is available on the typewriter, an additional opportunity to further improve the efficiency and productivity of the typewriter is presented.